It’s probably just the speculation of someone who during the day time mostly speaks German. “Being there” (dasein) can mean physically or mentally “there”.
I don’t think so, but thanks for your input.
This sounds right though.
Now, twenty or so years later, I can’t recall anything that may have triggered the experience, but it could be that I forgot that as well. I never did recover my memory of the time between waking and coming to my senses.
I haven’t experienced that before.
Or this …
I very often feel that I am more introspective than others, but it may be that people don’t open up on that in normal conversations. Sometimes I have had the feeling that if people talking to me were more introspective, that they would have less problems. Other times have not been able to fathom out how they came to their assumptions.
Hm, I never considered it before, but perhaps Kozinski who wrote the book was hinting at Heidigger with Being There.
Introspection leads pretty fast to cognitive dissonance. It also shows us our mixed feelings about things we don’t want to have mixed feelings about. It also let’s us in on reasons for our beliefs which are not are official reasons for our beliefs. It is not encouraged from without. And it is scary within.
But then, I can’t imagine what life would be like without it. I mean, without prioritizing it.
If I hadn’t, I would be living some other guy’s life.
I sometimes have the conscious experience of being the only me in the universe. If this is an experience of dasein, it is, for me, depressing. The only way out of the depression of supposed isolation is when I can feel the empathy of realizing that everyone else goes to this existential place or could and that I am a part of the universe.
As for running on autopilot, I think it is a common experience. Whether or not the state signifies dasein
is beyond me to explain.
Heideggers “Being and Time” shouldn’t be seen as his magnum opus, as he left it unfinished, as he realized he was running into the same walls of solid grammar.
He then moved on to specialize in Nietzsche and the Prescoratics and delivered a beautiful corpus of lectures. But then the war came.
After the war, he became focused on the question of technology.
In this, he steps back into Dasein.
His most archetypical piece of writing of that period is here, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” - and through this text you are guaranteed to gain an understanding of what Heidegger means with Dasein - his understanding had much matured since the 1920s, and he had become humble.
So according to Heidegger, Dasein has to do with dwelling (verweilen), which includes the building of the dwelling-place, and suggests peace and cultivation in that place. But the whole argument that is put forth in those ten pages is a matter of semantics, since, as Heidegger noted, the original meaning of the words has been lost.
It would be interesting though, to ask ourselves whether we dwell because we are conscious beings, or is it natural for animals to dwell as well. It appears that many of them do, albeit they do not cultivate themselves or the ground around them. I have been in houses where animals would feel at home (and very often they can be found there) whereas a cultivated human being would find it unpleasant and contrary to cultivation. Does this mean that in spite of our consciousness, in many cases we choose not to cultivate? Does that suggest that Dasein is not one thing, but has variances?
Actually, dwelling is a translation of Wohnen.
Curious isn’t it, that English doesn’t have a real word for this. It would have to be “living” (“Ich wohne hier” is “I live here”, but “Das ist meine Wohnung” could be “that is my dwelling”.)
It is certainly not semantics, it is a rather thorough philological exercise offering an opportunity for a modern continuation of Presocratic philosophy.
Birds build nests, otters build dams, ants build hills, and many animals groom themselves and each other.
Humans are quite quick to overlook the work of animals, but without the cultivating work of bees alone we’d go extinct.
When a burglar comes you’d say
Mein Haus! Raus und geh, schleich dich!
One could also translate bauen wohnen denken (Jesus what a battle with autocorrect) as building living thinking btw -
rather acquire a little extra meaning than a lot less.
Point to note though is that Deggerdegger is not translatable.
Not even into language, really.
Only into grass, cows, huts, ploughs, clouds, rain, farmers markets and Japan.
But we can give a negative definition of Dasein as building, dwelling and thinking, and in German, no less. Nicht-Dasein
dwell (dictionary.com/browse/dwell?s=t)
[ dwel ]
verb (used without object), dwelt or dwelled, dwell·ing.
to live or stay as a permanent resident; reside.
to live or continue in a given condition or state: to dwell in happiness.
to linger over, emphasize, or ponder in thought, speech, or writing (often followed by on or upon): to dwell on a particular point in an argument.
(of a moving tool or machine part) to be motionless for a certain interval during operation.
There is a case for my translation of dwelling as “verweilen”, even though in the colloquial it will always be regarded as “wohnen”. Reside may also translate as “wohnen”, but if I write in German that I “verweile” somewhere, I suggest that it is a lingering, tarrying, or is temporary, “sich an einem bestimmten Ort für eine Weile aufhalten, für eine kürzere Zeit bleiben“ as against saying “ich wohne”, which is definitely “to live” somewhere.
I didn’t mean to reduce the text in any way, but don’t you get the feeling that philology can get caught up in semantics? I have a friend who is a philologist and he has opened biblical texts in a fascinating way, showing the depth of Hebrew and Greek in comparison to Latin. A text tends to mean a lot more when he adds his perspective. But he too suggested that we not get caught up in ancient texts too much, because otherwise we get caught up in an ivory tower and lose contact with life. He said that his studies were much like the internet (before there was an internet) in which he could spend hours and forget to eat or drink.
[/quote]
This is what I mean. There is cultivation that comes from how creatures are “wired” to do something and cultivation that brings societies progressively forward. Agriculture, for example, helped overcome the daily struggle to find something to eat, although primitive culture was around when performing the rituals connected to hunting. Today, I get the feeling that we are forgetting the culture and instead, submitting ourselves unconsciously to sub-cultures, thereby foregoing the progress that culture has brought us as a society, and we fail to learn the lessons that got us there. If we had to pick up the pieces after some kind of conflict, we would probably start over again.
This is what I mean. There is cultivation that comes from how creatures are “wired” to do something and cultivation that brings societies progressively forward. Agriculture, for example, helped overcome the daily struggle to find something to eat, although primitive culture was around when performing the rituals connected to hunting. Today, I get the feeling that we are forgetting the culture and instead, submitting ourselves unconsciously to sub-cultures, thereby foregoing the progress that culture has brought us as a society, and we fail to learn the lessons that got us there. If we had to pick up the pieces after some kind of conflict, we would probably start over again.
dwell (dictionary.com/browse/dwell?s=t)
[ dwel ]
verb (used without object), dwelt or dwelled, dwell·ing.
to live or stay as a permanent resident; reside.
to live or continue in a given condition or state: to dwell in happiness.
to linger over, emphasize, or ponder in thought, speech, or writing (often followed by on or upon): to dwell on a particular point in an argument.
(of a moving tool or machine part) to be motionless for a certain interval during operation.
There is a case for my translation of dwelling as “verweilen”, even though in the colloquial it will always be regarded as “wohnen”. Reside may also translate as “wohnen”, but if I write in German that I “verweile” somewhere, I suggest that it is a lingering, tarrying, or is temporary, “sich an einem bestimmten Ort für eine Weile aufhalten, für eine kürzere Zeit bleiben“ as against saying “ich wohne”, which is definitely “to live” somewhere.
I didn’t mean to reduce the text in any way, but don’t you get the feeling that philology can get caught up in semantics? I have a friend who is a philologist and he has opened biblical texts in a fascinating way, showing the depth of Hebrew and Greek in comparison to Latin. A text tends to mean a lot more when he adds his perspective. But he too suggested that we not get caught up in ancient texts too much, because otherwise we get caught up in an ivory tower and lose contact with life. He said that his studies were much like the internet (before there was an internet) in which he could spend hours and forget to eat or drink.
[/quote]
This is what I mean. There is cultivation that comes from how creatures are “wired” to do something and cultivation that brings societies progressively forward. Agriculture, for example, helped overcome the daily struggle to find something to eat, although primitive culture was around when performing the rituals connected to hunting. Today, I get the feeling that we are forgetting the culture and instead, submitting ourselves unconsciously to sub-cultures, thereby foregoing the progress that culture has brought us as a society, and we fail to learn the lessons that got us there. If we had to pick up the pieces after some kind of conflict, we would probably start over again.
[/quote]
dwell (dictionary.com/browse/dwell?s=t)
[ dwel ]
verb (used without object), dwelt or dwelled, dwell·ing.
to live or stay as a permanent resident; reside.
to live or continue in a given condition or state: to dwell in happiness.
to linger over, emphasize, or ponder in thought, speech, or writing (often followed by on or upon): to dwell on a particular point in an argument.
(of a moving tool or machine part) to be motionless for a certain interval during operation.
There is a case for my translation of dwelling as “verweilen”, even though in the colloquial it will always be regarded as “wohnen”. Reside may also translate as “wohnen”, but if I write in German that I “verweile” somewhere, I suggest that it is a lingering, tarrying, or is temporary, “sich an einem bestimmten Ort für eine Weile aufhalten, für eine kürzere Zeit bleiben“ as against saying “ich wohne”, which is definitely “to live” somewhere.
I didn’t mean to reduce the text in any way, but don’t you get the feeling that philology can get caught up in semantics? I have a friend who is a philologist and he has opened biblical texts in a fascinating way, showing the depth of Hebrew and Greek in comparison to Latin. A text tends to mean a lot more when he adds his perspective. But he too suggested that we not get caught up in ancient texts too much, because otherwise we get caught up in an ivory tower and lose contact with life. He said that his studies were much like the internet (before there was an internet) in which he could spend hours and forget to eat or drink.
This is what I mean. There is cultivation that comes from how creatures are “wired” to do something and cultivation that brings societies progressively forward. Agriculture, for example, helped overcome the daily struggle to find something to eat, although primitive culture was around when performing the rituals connected to hunting. Today, I get the feeling that we are forgetting the culture and instead, submitting ourselves unconsciously to sub-cultures, thereby foregoing the progress that culture has brought us as a society, and we fail to learn the lessons that got us there. If we had to pick up the pieces after some kind of conflict, we would probably start over again.
Yes, indeed - I am Dutch and speak a fair bit of German having lived in Vienna, and the languages being quite close.
Indeed, the argument against “verweilen” here, which does intuitively very much compute with “dwelling” is that it isn’t permanent, that one isn’t cultivating a home.
I would argue that getting lost in such powerful ancient works is life - very much so! I find the ancient languages I have some teaching in to be very refreshing and often bring a more acute sense of reality than the language in which we are used to … verweilen.
It breaks automatisms, of our nation, and in general of modernity. But more than that, there simply is such immense life in much ancient literature.